A Land of Surprises and Marvels

This is Hsiao-Mei Lin's sixth exhibition at Adam Gallery, and marks a further extension of the painterly territory she occupies with such flair and distinction. Hsiao-Mei takes the landscape features of the world around us and subjects them to the powerful beam of her imagination. New colours and contours are revealed, new continents discovered. Her work transports us to the strange and beguiling world of her invention, and in the process allows us to look back upon our own realities with greater tolerance and understanding. Hsiao-Mei's landscapes of the mind offer not so much an escape as a triumphant return.

Hsiao-Mei trained first in her native Taiwan, pursuing a general education in art at Fu-Shin School of Arts & Trades in Taipei, the best-known and most prestigious art school in the country. The first two years offered a wide grounding in the visual arts: not only was she taught traditional Chinese art as well as Western modes, but also graphics, pottery, sculpture and design, before being allowed to specialise in the third year. She came to Britain in 1991 to continue her training in the West. Her first degree was from the University of Brighton, after which she studied at the Royal Academy Schools (1994-97) as a postgraduate. A prize-winning student of some distinction, she has gone on to consolidate her early success with a series of striking solo exhibitions with Adam Gallery. Her work remains grounded in landscape, though its most recent manifestations have tended to throw off the restrictions of realistic description in favour of atmospheric evocation.

She paints by preference on board, but in the last few years has begun working on canvas, particularly when thinking on a large scale. She still likes the gesso ground she used early in her career - ‘I love the textures,' she says - and paints on it in the small square panels which form the heart of her practice. In these, Hsiao-Mei is free to let her imagination run riot, and the results are richly inventive and packed with incident. The gesso ground enables her to sand back and repaint any passage she is unhappy with, without qualifying the integrity of the image. (She likes to keep some of what she calls ‘the history' of the image even when it does change. Thus, earlier ideas will form part of the final painting rather than being entirely erased.) The square format liberates her from the implied narrative of a larger horizontal shape - which always recalls the organisation of Chinese scrolls - and makes composition less of an issue. Without these various constraints, Hsiao-Mei can paint directly and emphatically, traversing the mountains of the mind with her brush of dreaming and adventure.

I am reminded in her affection for this strategy of Ken Kiff's early adherence to gesso panels which he painted and repainted. He too liked the toughness and variability of the gesso ground. And a further connection between these two artists exists in the kinship of their approach to landscape - not naturalistic, but the product of reverie and heightened awareness. With the bigger paintings, Hsiao-Mei often starts working on them on the wall, then transfers them to the floor so that she can pour paint in the puddles and patterns the work requires.

As Antoni Tàpies (an artist Hsiao-Mei much admires) has noted, it's not always possible to match up the pictures of one's dreams or imagination with the images which emerge on the canvas. The translation is full of difficulties. Tàpies says: ‘The first thing one has to do is to engage in a dialogue with the materials: they speak, they have a language of their own, and from this the dialogue develops between the artist and his materials. One often has to discard ideas because they conflict with the materials. Then a kind of struggle begins between the idea which I'm trying to express and the material form that I want to give it.'

Hsiao-Mei often finds that changes are dictated by the materials, by her dialogue with the paint. Her approach is very physical and visceral. She likes to play around and invent colours, to feel the pigment with her fingers - she talks of its taste, its strength. She says ‘it's almost like eating a cake'. She's very aware of the intensity of it: the emotional reading as much as the transparency or opacity of hue.

The act of painting is paramount. She speaks of having to think herself into a movement, like a gymnast, in order to get it right. She evidently spends considerable time concentrating on what she will do before doing it. The Chinese strategy of preparing to making a gesture, through a long series of warm-up activities of hand and mind, then finally executing it very quickly and unwaveringly, is only part of her approach. The contrary notion, of collaborating with her materials and letting them dictate the development of an image, is equally important to her. She begins by imagining the whole direction of a picture before one stroke is painted, but that initial image changes greatly in the process of its making. In fact, the end result may owe as little as 30 per cent to forethought and 70 per cent to the paint developing the image. Thus, very different approaches to the making of art - the tradition of Chinese landscape painting and the gestural furnace of Abstract Expressionism - are joined and uniquely channelled through the person of Hsiao-Mei.

Her imagery is very personal: visionary and lyrical, with a strong element of mischief or humour. ‘Wonderland' is the theme of the present group of paintings. The subject, like her work, is at once contemporary and ancient: a land of surprises and marvels. I am reminded of the subterranean world conjured up in The Green Child (1935), the only novel of the anarchist, art critic and poet, Herbert Read. In this odd and original book, Read makes the hero of his allegory, Olivero, wish to escape from this world, even when his own benign dictatorship can achieve Utopia. ‘To escape from the sense of time', he writes, ‘to live in the eternity of what he was accustomed to call “the divine essence of things” - that was his only desire.' It's quite clear from looking at Hsiao-Mei's paintings, and entering her world, that this is what she manages to approach: the divine essence of things. But the parallels with Herbert Read's novel are even closer.

In the book, Olivero encounters the mysterious Green Child, an alien girl called in her own land Siloën. With her he undertakes a mystic journey to her country, up the millstream that runs backwards to a mountain pool which is the entrance to this other world. They emerge through the water into a crystalline land of much beauty. Read describes it thus: ‘They found themselves in a large grotto, filled with an aqueous light, blue in the darker reaches, pale green towards the apparent outlet. A rocky basin, rising in many green and mossy ledges, filled the floor of the grotto. The walls were irregular, and from the roof hung long glassy icicles, sometimes so long that they touched the floor and made round columns, tapering inwards towards their axes.' It is a world of petrified beauty, very fitting for a supporter of Surrealism like Read, as it sounds rather like something out of a Max Ernst painting. It's also reminiscent of Hsiao-Mei's imagined world, with its leaning towards aqueous blues and greens, though the climate of her work (both colouristic and emotional) is altogether warmer.

Another point of reference for Hsiao-Mei's work is The Bible, and in particular ‘The Revelation to John‘. The Bible is not a book you expect to find in the studio of many young artists, but Hsiao-Mei reads it and finds much to interest her therein. The imagery in the Book of Revelations has long excited artists, not least the fabulous beasts with many eyes, and if these are not to be immediately discerned in Hsiao-Mei's paintings, the richly coloured settings of jasper and cornelian, a rainbow that looks like an emerald and a sea of glass like crystal, do have parallels in her pictures.

Although most of her paintings are about place, there are occasional inhabitants. She creates creatures you've never seen before, strange hybrids that look like a cross between a bird and an elephant. She loves the story told of koi carp, that if they jump over the dragon's gate on a certain day, they too can become dragons. This possibility of transfiguration, of metamorphosis, is a constant undercurrent in her work. Look at the series of smallish upright canvases, mostly in blue and cream, edgy things with the half-mysterious, half-prosaic titles of Pottery Hill, Elephant Evolution and Royal Kittens. There is a strong element of fantasy to Hsiao-Mei's work. It demands and deserves a suspension of disbelief. She herself says of imagination: ‘I couldn't live without it.'

The painting which gives this exhibition its title, Wonderland, is a terrific burst of imagery, all thrust and curdled paint, in mauve-pink and rich, dark greens. It took six months to resolve. ‘I think the most difficult colours to use are grey and pink,‘ Hsiao-Mei says. ‘If you don't get it right, it looks cheap.' Her enticingly titled Love Generator has a pale orange washed on first. Its various formal incidents or shapes evoke landscape or other organic matter without describing it. Her rock clusters and boulder are like a Christmas pudding, there's an oyster shape and what might be a disembodied eye. (The eyeball is a regular feature of her imagery.) The everyday is effortlessly poeticised. Her paintings remind you of the effect of blinking while looking at a star, that crystalline burst of light.

These paintings are like journeys into the deep space of fantasy, or fording rivers of gems. Hsiao-Mei speaks of the mathematics of painting, of aiming for perfection, but also knowing that all beauty is flawed, not perfect. For her, getting the equation right might be akin to making a leap of faith. She is fascinated by the afterlife, and speculates about what it's like to float on a pink space, lie under a soft cushion of cloud, or whistle up a forest. As she insists: ‘Painting's about having fun too.' Her enjoyment of materials and imagery is everywhere apparent. Like a gardener, she likes getting her hands dirty, working with her fingers delicately to smudge marks, or more robustly to join different pours of paint. She does use a variety of brushes, but her approach is determinedly hands-on.

Geometry is rare in these paintings. Unusually, Wonderlake, one of the finest of the group, includes a small stack of square-ish building blocks at the edge of a lake. The lake itself is like a vignette floating in empty turquoise, almost eau-de-Nil space. For this painting, Hsiao-Mei had to restrain herself from filling the surface with more imagery. Much of the painting's power comes from the fact that it stays simple. In fact, she even simplified it, cutting down the action in the foreground with a powerful wash of grey.

Garden of Joy is a painting dominated by a shape like an exploded armchair. (Inescapably, Matisse's dictum that art should be like a comfortable armchair comes to mind.) Her imagery looks at times like highly charged chemical compounds combining and separating out. Chemical reactions. It's also reminiscent of the crystal gardens beloved of schoolboys, when a glass box or jar was filled with isinglass, and crystals of sulphur or copper sulphate were dropped into it to grow into fantastic multi-branching lengths over time.

She loves to travel and goes diving a lot, most recently visiting Borneo and Sarawak. The underwater kingdom revealed by snorkelling evidently stimulates the imagery of her work, though her observations of the natural world are of less active importance to her painting than the power of the subconscious. Her reliance on the direction of the imagination owes much to the ‘automatic' processes of the Surrealists, but she is closer in spirit to a maverick like Tanguy (a great painter of magical landscapes) than that arch stylist Dalí. Among the artists she admires are Milton Avery and Jack B Yeats, Soutine and Marlene Dumas. She is unburdened by preconceptions, and can enjoy the startling originality of Lowry's landscapes without being fazed by his (to many) troublesome reputation for painting matchstick men or being unsophisticatedly demotic. That freshness of thought is evident throughout her work. These new paintings offer many pleasures: aesthetic, emotional, formal. In them we can almost see the celestial music of the spheres.

Andrew Lambirth 2008